Heaven Sent
by B.A. Tyler
Summary: A foot soldier wanders into camp, bringing a mysterious illness along with him. Updated with Chapters 2 and 3 - now complete.
1. Chapter 1

_(Author's Note: I stole the opening sentence from Stephen King ("The Mist"), who in turn had stolen it from Douglas Fairbairn ("Shoot"). King calls this line "the essence of all story," and I've always wanted to use it as a starting point. Here is the result.)_

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**Heaven Sent**

This is what happened.

I wasn't actually supposed to tell anyone—that was our pact. Capt. Pierce said nobody'd believe it anyway, but even so, we all agreed it would be a good idea to keep it to ourselves.

But almost everyone who was involved is gone now. Col. Potter… he passed long ago. Hawkeye and Charles and Maj. Houlihan… all left us over the past few years. B.J.'s still hanging in there, but he's not as lucid as he used to be and he lives in a nursing home now. When I visit him, which is rare because he's still on the west coast, he usually can't remember who I am, even when I show him photos of me in my dresses.

So it's time, I think, to tell the story. Why not? It was unbelievable, but it was real—we all agreed on that, all those years ago. It was a miracle. And this is how it happened.

It began on a Saturday night, when the war was in a lull. That happened from time to time, all of a sudden the fighting would die down for a while and we would find ourselves with nothing much to do. Sometimes we'd start up a marathon poker game in the O Club, sometimes we'd gather in the mess tent and watch a movie, sometimes we'd just get bored.

On this particular Saturday night, I was alone in my tent, doing some sewing. One of my dresses needed mending. I know what you're thinking: why did I go to so much trouble, not only wearing dresses but also designing them, sewing them, making them from scratch? Well I figured, if you're going to try to get out of the service by acting crazy, you might as well go all the way.

I was sewing away in my tent, probably humming some tune like "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah," when I heard a shout from out in the compound.

"Hey! Somebody come help! Wounded soldier here!"

I put the sewing aside and ran out there. It'd been Igor who'd called, and he was no good with the wounded. I mean, he didn't have any experience. He was a nice guy and wanted to help, he just didn't have the medical background. Not that I had a lot myself, but I was at least more helpful than Igor.

The soldier in question wasn't actually wounded, though. He'd collapsed right there in front of Igor, but he wasn't bleeding or injured in any obvious way. I told Igor to run to the Swamp and find one of the doctors, and while he did that, I gave the soldier a pat or two on the cheek. He seemed to be out cold.

"Hey? Hey, guy? Are you wounded or sick or what?"

No response. But yeah, my guess was he was sick, because there was no wound I could see.

Hawkeye and B.J. came running with Igor in tow, and they asked me what was up.

"I don't know, sirs. I don't see any blood. Was he shot, Igor?"

Igor shook his head. "He just walked up to me and held out his hand, and then he fainted. That's all I know. I never seen him before."

Neither had I. He looked like a foot soldier; I guessed he had walked off the front line and wandered into our camp… AWOL.

Hawkeye called for a litter, and in no time, we had the guy moved into post-op, where the doctors could treat him.

Except first they needed to diagnose him, and as we found out over the next few hours, that wasn't going to be easy. They'd never seen this illness before. The guy remained unconscious, so he couldn't tell the docs anything about where he might have picked up his disease or whatever it was.

At first the docs considered hemorrhagic fever, which was a nasty disease we saw quite a bit of during that war. It was very serious, although we eventually learned how to better treat it, and that helped us save many a young soldier.

But the doctors ruled out hemorrhagic fever with a few tests, and instead they were left with… well, with nothing. They'd never seen these specific symptoms before, and they were growing more and more frustrated because the soldier (whose name was Britten, according to his dog tags) only seemed to be getting progressively worse.

You could always tell when the doctors there at the 4077th got panicky, because they had this look they exchanged with each other. They wouldn't put their panic or their worst fears into words, but I could read it on their faces.

They were worried as hell about Britten, and they suspected they were going to lose him, and what made them even crazier was that they didn't know what they were going to lose him _to_. At least when a soldier dies from being shot, they knew the cause of his death. In this particular case, they were going to watch a young man die from something they couldn't name.

The frustration, the anger, and the stress were written on everyone's faces. You could practically see it in the air, it was that overwhelming.

But that was nothing compared to the sheer, unadulterated terror when, on Sunday night, just about 24 hours after Britten staggered into our camp, Col. Potter suddenly fell ill with the very same disease.

(to be continued)


	2. Chapter 2

Col. Potter had just eaten in the mess tent and came back to post-op to continue monitoring Britten's condition. Hawkeye, B.J., and Charles were practically watching the guy round the clock, trying to figure out what the hell he had and how to treat it. The Colonel walked in, asked them if anything had changed (it had not), and then, out of the blue, announced, "I feel dizzy." Then bam! He fell unconscious to the floor, just like that.

Hawkeye and Charles ran to him and got him onto a bed, but they were already thinking the unthinkable: that he had caught Britten's disease. And if the Colonel had it, then that meant the Colonel could…

No, we didn't want to think it. Nobody spoke it out loud. But we all did the same thing. We looked from Britten, who was just barely hanging on, just barely drawing breath, to Col. Potter, apparently in the first stages of the same illness, and we put two and two together.

It was an awful night. I don't think any of us slept. The doctors pored over medical journals and textbooks, but they didn't find any disease that quite matched what they were seeing.

In the midst of all that, we actually got incoming wounded. We were short-staffed, with the Colonel being out of commission, and the doctors we did have were functioning on very little sleep. I still don't know how we made it through that OR session. It was a brutal one.

It was after we finished up with the casualties that it happened. And this is according to Hawkeye, because he was the first one to experience it. He later told us about it, worrying out loud that we weren't going to believe him, but by that time, a lot of us had had the same thing happen to us.

Hawkeye'd been the first, though.

He had gone to the mess tent for a bite to eat after the OR session, and he was on his way back to post-op to check on Britten and Col. Potter. The rest of us were already there, hoping against hope that they'd taken a turn for the better while we'd been busy in surgery, but no. They were both in bad shape and getting worse. And still nobody had any ideas about treatment.

It was past midnight and there wasn't much activity out in the compound that time of night, especially since so many of us were practically obsessed with our mystery disease in post-op. So Hawkeye was very much alone on his walk back from the mess tent. And in the pitch darkness, in the still night air, he said he heard, very distinctly: "Here's looking up your old address."

It was the voice, he said, of Henry Blake. There was no doubt at all in his mind.

Henry was, I should add, our previous C.O., the one before Col. Potter. A good egg… a very, very good egg. Henry had been killed in a plane crash on his way home to Illinois. So you see, there's no possible way Hawkeye could have been hearing the man's voice.

No possible way.

Except that he knew he had.

He went suddenly still and looked all around him. There was no one around, not that he could see.

He felt silly, but he called out, "Henry?" And waited.

Silence. Just as he was about to shake off the incident and continue on to post-op, the voice spoke up again. "Pierce? Do you hear me?"

Hawkeye later told us his blood ran cold. He nearly fell to his knees, he was that shattered. It _was_ Henry's voice… he was sure of it. "Henry?" he said. "Henry Blake?"

"Pierce, listen to me. It's important. The young man who brought the sickness into camp…? He veered off the path. He's not supposed to be here. It wasn't supposed to spread to Sherman. It's all wrong."

Sherman… he called Col. Potter "Sherman," and that more than anything else sent Hawkeye reeling. He was suddenly positive he was losing his mind. He was sure his brain was making this whole thing up. He was exhausted and his head ached with the pressure of trying to diagnose the mysterious illness, so he figured this was just some kind of hallucination. Or whatever you call a hallucination that you hear.

"Can you still hear me, Pierce? Is this thing on? Ha ha ha." The Henry voice just laughed and laughed at his own joke. I told Hawkeye later, that sounds like Col. Blake, all right.

Hawkeye told him yes, he was still hearing. He was just having a hard time believing.

The Henry voice got serious again and said, "It wasn't supposed to happen like this. The soldier veered off the path. This needs to be fixed."

And then he told Hawkeye, in detail, exactly how to treat the illness that Britten had brought to our camp.


	3. Chapter 3

_(Author's Note: The drug named herein, Tempamathorphan, is totally made up.)_

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Well, you've probably already guessed that the treatment Col. Blake described to Hawkeye worked.

Capt. Pierce came running back to post-op after that little mid-camp meeting with the ghost of Henry Blake and started barking out orders. "Klinger, run to the supply tent and get a couple vials of Tempamathorphan, quick! Beej and Charles, listen up, we need to get new IVs going for both of these guys. I know how to treat them… I know what to do."

And at the time, we didn't ask questions. We supposed he'd just had some kind of epiphany while in the mess tent and that he suddenly knew what we were dealing with. Only later did he tell us the truth.

But like I said before, by that time, many of us had gotten our own visits from the late Henry Blake.

My encounter with him came the following morning. Through the night, after the doctors administered the medicine and other treatments that Hawkeye had ordered, both Britten and Col. Potter began to improve. It was gradual, but it was clear they were going to be fine. "Relief" doesn't even begin to describe how we felt. The weight of the world lifted off our shoulders. And the end of the crisis meant that we could all finally relax and get some rest. So at 3 in the morning, I made my way back to my tent for some much-needed, wonderful sleep.

I awoke at 10 and when my eyes blinked open, Col. Blake was standing just inside the door of my tent. I rubbed my eyes because I was sure I was seeing things. I blinked a whole bunch of times, but there he stood.

He smiled at me and said, "How's it going, Klinger?"

I nearly jumped out of my skin. At the same time, I was too scared to move. What I wanted to do was go over to him and see if I could actually touch him. He didn't look solid, if you know what I mean. There was a kind of transparency to him.

"Klinger, I can't stick around here long. The patients are getting well again, and that's what I was sent to do. But I wanted to tell you… you're a good man, you know. The stunts you pulled… I understood why you wanted out of the Army, I even had a good time with it. But underneath all of that craziness, you're a very good man. It was a pleasure to serve with you."

And then he opened the door and walked out. As if he weren't a ghost.

I didn't move for a really long time. I eventually convinced myself it was a dream. One hell of a vivid dream.

But a day later, as Britten and Col. Potter continued to get better in post-op (both of them were even eating solid food by that time), all of us sat in the mess tent and one by one, we told our stories of seeing or hearing Henry Blake. Hawkeye was the one who brought it up, because we all wanted to know how he'd come by his miracle cure out of the blue like that. And he'd said, "Boys and girls, do I have a story to tell you about _that_. I'm sure you won't believe me, but that's all right. I want to tell it anyway."

After he explained what had happened to him, I figured, _what the hell_… and told them that Col. Blake had visited me also. Then Maj. Houlihan, Radar, and Father Mulcahy spoke up about encounters they'd had.

You know a supernatural experience really happened when the camp priest tells you it did.

We all shared our stories, and by the time we were finished, we were all pretty much crying and hugging each other. Even B.J. and Charles, who had never met Henry Blake, felt the emotion and wonder of our last conversations with our departed friend.

After we were all cried out, we raised our coffee mugs in a toast to Col. Blake.

So there you have it. That's the story. As Hawkeye said all those years ago, I know you might not believe it, but I wanted to tell it anyway.

Ever since I saw Henry Blake in my tent that morning, I have always believed in ghosts. And in miracles.


End file.
